To clarify, it wasn’t any of the companies you see in this picture.

This week I received an email (I’m sure many of my colleagues received it too) from a large, well-known condom company offering me the “opportunity” to “collaborate” with them (you’ll understand all the quotation marks in a minute). I thought “Collaboration? That sounds fun! Do they want my input on a new kind of condom? Maybe they’re looking to bring in sex educators to help spread the safer sex word! Collaboration could mean so many fun things!”

Except it didn’t.

Here’s what “collaboration” meant:

“Hello JoEllen,

I am working with [REDACTED] to help promote their products and connect with online resources and blogs. I came across your blog and think that you would be perfect for this blogger collaboration project!

[REDACTED] will provide you with 2 gift bags of [REDACTED] products (1 for you to keep and 1 to giveaway to one of your readers).

 Guidelines:

1.Create a blog post talking about the sex positions you want to try

2.Share the “Sex Positions to Try” page (they included a helpful link!)

3.Host a giveaway on your blog and select a winner to receive the gift bag of [REDACTED] products

4.Share your blog post on your social media channels

5.Incorporate a rel=”nofollow” tag (you know, so Google won’t think they’re spamming while they, well, spam) when you share on your blog. If you need help doing this please let us know and we can give you step by step instructions.

Please let me know if you are interested in participating and if you have any questions.”

Did you catch it? Did you? The part where a large, successful world-wide condom company offered to pay me for a not-small amount of work with CONDOMS. The part where they offered to pay for exposure to the entire network of followers that I have painstakingly built over the last 3 years with CONDOMS. The part where they indicated that my time, my work, my business and my name are worth CONDOMS.

Yeah, so that happened.

I was going to let it go. Just ignore the email and let it go. Then my amazing friend Elle Chase mentioned that she was writing back to them and we got to talking about it, about how this undervaluing of our time, our work and our names would keep happening if we didn’t call companies on it. I realized she was right. There are so many people out there who think it’s appropriate to ask us to work for nothing, to dangle “exposure” like this carrot on a stick that’s supposed to keep us generating free PR (or labor or whatever they need) for them forever. The whole thing propagates the notion that what we do doesn’t have value, that we don’t have “real jobs”, that we should expect to scrape by while putting in the 18 hour days because that’s what passion and an unconventional career should look like. (check out what Elle Chase aka Lady Cheeky has to say about all this in her piece Will (Not) Work For Condoms)

I got a bit riled up.

Elle had formulated her response to condom-company-who-should-have-known-better and we talked about just sending identical responses so as to send the message “we’re pissed AND we’re in cahoots” but I was too worked up for that so I ended up with a version that I keep referring to as “rant-y and self-important”

Here it is:

“Hi [REDACTED]

To be clear the offer on the table is that I:

1)  Write a blog post about “sex positions to try,” which would include a link to a similar post on [REDACTED]’s site, driving traffic to your site.

2) Create a contest promoting [REDACTED] to my multitude of readers by providing a [REDACTED] product gift bag as the prize

3) Promote this contest for [REDACTED] products through my social media sites – Promoting [REDACTED] all over my social media the whole time

and

4) Include a ‘nofollow’ tag in any related html so that it doesn’t look like spam, even though I’m spamming my readers on your behalf

For all this work, I wouldn’t get paid, but instead [REDACTED] would give me a gift bag of their condoms and lube?

This is not collaboration, this is exploitation. 

Do you imagine that aligning myself with the [REDACTED] name is such a fantastic opportunity for me, an established voice in the sex writing community, that I’m willing to invest hours of free labor in it? I wouldn’t do this for a company I actually have a relationship with let alone one that seems to have no idea who I am or what I do. If you had done your research, you would see that I am a professional sex educator and paid writer. I speak nationally, I’m in the middle of writing a book. I get paid for my time, just like you get paid for writing and sending these emails to sex bloggers. I don’t work for condoms. No one should work for condoms. Would you work for condoms?

You aren’t fooling anyone here so stop insulting us by trying to pass this off as “collaborating” with bloggers “on behalf of [REDACTED]” and instead, come up with a cross-promotional idea that benefits BOTH parties involved rather than just recruiting people who you clearly don’t value at all to give you free PR.

Thank you for your time

JoEllen Notte”

Here’s the thing, somewhere along the line companies got the idea that this was acceptable. Somewhere along the line the message got sent that our time, our work, our sites, our names don’t have value and as long as there are some people taking the bait on this type of “collaboration” it’s going to keep going on. We need to value ourselves, our time and our work. Even if you are just starting out and this seems like a great way to get new followers, think about what accepting this offer does – it tells this company that you are at their disposal, that you will work for condoms. It continues the cycle of these insulting “proposals” going out to writers and it reinforces the idea that it’s okay to not pay us. You’re not only screwing other writers, you’re, in the long-run, screwing yourself.

So, I’m putting the call out: don’t accept these offers and what’s more, tell these companies why they are wrong. The next time a clueless company approaches you with an “exciting opportunity” to work for free as their PR machine remember, our work is valuable, what we do matters and we deserve to be paid and remind them of that too.